For the Love of Making Your Own

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A couple of weeks ago I got together with my friends Susan and Janice and Janice brought along the most heavenly combination of foods – crackers, creamy soft-ripened cheese and a cherry spread from Bon Maman. Each of these simple foods was delicious in its own right, but together they were some kind of wonderful. This spurred me on to find my copy of Edible Flowers, an enchanting little 1980s book from the UK by Claire Clifton with illustrations by […]

As I was lying in bed the other night the following words suddenly appeared in my brain … Madam Marabou wore one yellow shoe. Isn’t that the oddest thing? In the midst of my middle of the night worrying, scheming, planning … Madam Marabou … and a yellow shoe. Where do you think these things come from? I have an idea. Did you ever see the movie, Always? Always is a Steven Spielberg remake of a 1940s movie called A […]

Early last week I was feeling so low about things in the news. One brutal act after another. Then as I was rinsing a dish at my kitchen sink I saw a dear neighbor walk by through my window. She and her family are going through a hard time right now and I find myself wondering at her courage every day. The next day I went to get my mail and I found the following written in chalk on the […]

Are you familiar with Mats Gustafson’s watercolor fashion illustrations? If not, you should be. As near as I can tell he was the one that illustrated the Bemberg ads below that I tore out of sewing magazines in the 90s because I thought they were so cool. But I didn’t know who Mats Gustafson was until a couple of years ago when I learned about him from a Euromaxx story. That’s when I discovered more of his watercolor illustrations and […]

I get excited about paper, stationery in particular. And when I say stationery I mean just about anything that I can write or draw on. It’s so fun to pick up new bits of it this time of year. Do you keep a notebook? I do. I use it to record all kinds of things – shopping lists of various kinds, party or holiday plans, ideas for my blog, worries, notes on household projects. I found the spiral bound book […]

It is only mid-August, but already school has sprung where we live. I have mixed feelings about school beginning in August. Summer seems left behind too early and yet the freedom of it … for parents anyway. I love to help Samantha trick out her new school accessories. When she picked out this pencil box at Target I knew I had the perfect embellishment for it: my Slätthult butterfly stickers (made in France!) that I picked up at IKEA a […]

I’ve been meaning to tell you about this pitcher. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? It belongs to our neighbors, Sharon and Rolf. That color, that shape – so feminine in a Scandinavian mid-century modern kind of way. Every year when Sharon and Rolf’s lavender is in bloom they send some over in this pitcher for Samantha and eventually we return the pitcher to them. It’s awfully thoughtful of them and has become such a tradition that when the pitcher never arrived […]

“I used to work for the magazines and I always thought I was being original, and then they’d never want it. This is when I decided not to be imaginative.” – Andy Warhol, 1986 He’s been dead for nearly thirty years, but Andy Warhol continues to surprise me. I suppose I first became aware of him in the late seventies, but to tell you the truth I wasn’t very interested in him at the time. All I knew about then […]

Project Runway is doing a show tonight inspired by the style of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. You’d never know it from the promo they’re showing though. It looks like things get positively ugly which is so not Jackie. I too have been smitten by her style. In my mind’s eye I can see her as a debutante, as First Lady, and in late middle age, but my favorite image is probably as Jackie O., wearing those sandals, white pants, black top […]